S Stirling - The Council of Shadows

A dog whimpered inside the house. Beyond was dense shadow, and he went belly-down on the stained concrete as he approached the motel, as intent as a tabby with a mouse. The slit pupils of his eyes widened nearly round as he scanned back and forth. The Power stretched out too, despite the pain of the silver barrier, seeking A tingle. A strumming along the nerves. The feeling of matter turned and constrained, a knot of warped probabilities. Will imposed on chaos and dragging a piece of the universe down the slope of entropy as it did. Up there.

The great cat had a different perception of distance than did a man; it was more concerned with what was within one or two leaps, very much with scents, less so with larger patterns. He forced its attention outwards.

Flying.

The huge golden eagle came with a whoosh of displaced air to land on the flat roof. Then a naked man was there instead, his long white-blond hair blowing around his muscled shoulders. He kicked something upward as if with a soccer ball and caught it, something that the eagle had carried in its talons. Then he began to walk forward sure-footed towards the other side of the roof, the inner court where the units of the motel faced.

There he paused, looked over the edge, and made a gesture. Hands together, then apart, then dropping something…

Grenade, the thinking part of the sabertooth's hybrid mind said. The rest replied: Kill.

Huge muscles moved on the creature's bones, and claws flared out as it worked its paws into the dirt. Then he was flying, a bronze streak through the darkness, his mouth gaping open to keep the lower jaw out of the way of the stabbing downward slash. The man toppled forward over the edge of the roof, changing as he did.

The door blew in. Peter tumbled backwards towards the bed; things hit him, astonishingly painful, and he yelped. There was a flash with it, and a crashing bang! and a sharp, acrid smell. "Grenade!" someone yelled.

Lying blinking at the ceiling, all he could think for an instant was: That's a grenade? That little flash?

He'd expected globes of slow-motion flame and people flying through the air with their arms and legs windmilling. But the blow had been hard; he tasted blood in his mouth again. And loud, his ears were numbed.

What next?

A gorilla smashed through the shattered door, great black fists punching inward and then ripping the broken veneer and particleboard out of the way. Its shoulders sent chunks of the frame pinwheeling as well as it charged into the room, nearly five hundred pounds of black-shaggy silver-backed rank-smelling beast, roaring behind fangs that looked like daggers of white bone and beating its fists on a leathery chest like a great drum. Hair bristled in a roach on the pointed head, and the creature's thigh-thick arms stretched out to grip and crush as it bounded forward on its thick bowed legs in a shambling run.

Gorillas arent aggressive towards human beings! Peter thought, or gibbered. I remember that distinctly from that Dian Fossey article I read.

Guha ducked a fist that would have torn off her head and slashed with the long knife, then went flying head over heels at an openhanded cuff that hit not quite squarely.

But Shadowspawn weregorillas are pretty damned aggressive, you betcha.

Peter shook his head, winced at the pain that caused, and looked around for the silver table knife. He spotted it, and began a dogged crawl-roll towards it, ignoring the pain of the fresh bruises on his still-fragile body. The rest he saw in flashes, and heard bits and pieces as his blast-stunned ears began to function again.

Farmer drove at the beast's back with his blade. It whirled and caught him up, holding the man's yelling form over its head, ready to throw him down with enough force to turn his body into a bag of shattered bone and ruptured organs. Something flew glittering through the air and slashed into the gorilla's arms, lapping around them with a harsh rattling clank and a rip of leathery skin. Blood sprayed…and dissolved in midair with an iridescent sparkle as the pseudomatter lost coherence.

That was the older man, Harvey. The weapon was a kau sin ke, a Chinese fighting iron; he recognized it from one of his guilty pleasures, the Shanghai action flicks of the late teens. Like a steel whip made from short rods joined by ring links of chain, but this had a silvery gleam, and each of the rods was a cylinder of razor-sharp blades.

The Shadowspawn beast screamed again, a stunningly loud roar even to Peter's abused ears. Farmer tumbled away as it tried to clutch at the weapon, but more blood spurted from its huge hands as they met the sharp silver-inlaid edges of the jointed bars. Harvey turned the fighting iron into a whirling blur between himself and the giant ape, a gleaming circle of menace to protect himself and the injured humans. It filled most of the little motel room; Peter could see the sweat of effort and fear gleaming on the older man's long, craggy face, and the way the muscles bunched and gathered on the gorillas massive bones. It knuckle-walked a pace back and forth, then stood and hammered its chest again, shrieking.

Farmer crawled away and picked up his blade, long as a short sword, forcing himself back onto his feet; Peter found himself clutching the little sharpened table knife. He looked at the pathetic spike in his scrawny fist and suppressed a hysterical giggle. The gorilla would charge in an instant, even though its hands streamed lines of blood…blood that somehow disappeared as it dripped towards the floor. It would charge, and those hands would close on a human body, and that would be the end of it.

He would die free, at least. Oddly, that actually was comforting. He propped himself up on one hand and held the little knife out in a wavering attempt at guard.

An appalling shriek filled the room, halfway between a scream and a coughing roar. A tawny thunderbolt came through the ruined door.

It struck the gorilla with a massive thud, and the combined forms went over and over in a ton-weight ball of black and brown and claws and saberlike canines and hammering fists the size of small casks. More blood and black bristly hide and skin covered in short sand-covered fur flew and misted away. For a moment Peter could see the gorilla's hands locked around the cat's throat, holding the dreadful stab of the long canines away, and the sabertooth's hind paws raking at its swag belly.

Harvey threw himself aside with a yell, dropping the kau sin ke. Something hit him in midleap, and he tumbled away to crash into the cheap bureau in a shatter of age-dried pressboard. A twisting in the melee, and suddenly it was two giant cats, rearing on their hind legs and slamming back and forth at each other with their taloned paws, sabertooth against Siberian tiger.

Another twisting, and it was two naked men facing each other, one dark, one fair, both lithe and muscular. Their snarls were as bestial as the animals' had been. Those turned into words as they circled, purling, spitting, their fingers tracing shapes in the air that hurt the eyes to watch. Peter yelled and rolled away off the edge of the bed as the wall behind him suddenly turned freezing cold, the sort of cold that would tear off your skin if you touched it. An instant later the frame of the broken door burst into flames. With a screech the Mhabrogast glyphs around the edges of the room began to glow.

Cherenkov radiation! Peter thought. And they're changing, too.

He felt an impulse to beat his head open against the floor. Images spun through his mind, intolerable glimpses down dark whirlpools that spun through the depth of things. For an instant the flames seemed to melt the blond man's form, making it run. Then he turned and leapt, arms before his face as he dove through the blaze. Through the fire Peter could see him take a dozen strides and then throw himself into the air. A fractional second, and an eagle thrashed itself skyward.